Tag: blog comments

Clickbait. We know it. We love it. We hate it. We nonetheless click on it. Anyone who has been online in the last decade is probably all too familiar with clickbait. The word itself is a pejorative term for content that is aimed at generating a quick buck without caring much about accuracy, quality or anything else. The key is to lure in the reader, usually with a sensational headline, and basically do anything at all to make sure that reader clicks.

Somehow clickbait has taken over the Internet. In 2016 it seems to be totally ubiquitous and almost impossible to escape. This is probably largely down to a journalistic change in incentives. Many online publications offer their writers payment that consists of a flat fee plus a commission per clicks. At its center this focuses on the heart of most online content today – keeping readers interested. The more clicks, the more people are interested, the more money can be generated. The problem is that clickbait has become something that panders to the lowest common denominator. It has moved very far away from journalistic morality and has shifted the focus of writing to trivia and nonsense rather than real news.

Apart from anything else, clickbait is incredibly irritating, yet it seems to have become the default language of the digital world. There are increasing ways of producing it and various strategies of getting precious clicks. These include cat GIFS, missing words in story headlines and never-ending quizzes. It’s actually hard to remember a time when an endless stream of clickbait didn’t exclusively define the online world.

But all of this might be changing. There is now a growing backlash against the clickbait culture. This movement has seen readers across platforms demanding a return to real reporting and a move away from trash stories designed only to manipulate users into clicking. The movement was mainly grassroots but now that seems to be changing too. Facebook has changed the face of clickbait by rolling out an anti-clickbait algorithm. With the anti-clickbait movement now working on a top-down and bottom-up basis, perhaps the face of journalism online really will be undergoing a transformation.

And if you want to do your part to move away from aggressive clickbait type advertising to more effective forms of connecting with your users there are some simple things you can do. For starters, you can use native advertising which is much less intrusive and organically refers users to adverts related to the content they are actually interested in. Another way of joining the anti-clickbait movement (albeit on a small scale) is to focus on generating quality content.

Now quality content is often too time-consuming or expensive to generate in the quantities that might be needed. However, there are a few helpful shortcuts. The main one is to shift away from brand generated content towards user-generated content. Not only is it less work intensive, it is also more authentic. In essence, it is the polar opposite of clickbait. And what can you do to start generating authentic high-quality user content? The answer is simple; find a fun and easy to use platform where your readers can comfortably share their thoughts questions and opinions on your website, business, product or service.

Heyoya is a unique comment and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya’s new Receiver plan allows for quick and easy below-the-fold monetization. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content.

The word ‘ambiguity’ comes from the Greek word ‘ambi’ which literally means two. The term originally referred to words or terms that had two or more meanings, but over time it has come to refer to a multiplicity of meanings or lack of singularity in expression. Of course, different languages have different degrees of ambiguity, and arguably Latin has the most, especially when it comes to nouns. But the English language is unquestionably full of a great deal of ambiguity too.

Ambiguous language is the source of a lot of great literature. Just think of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be”. If we knew exactly what he was talking about here, we probably wouldn’t have had decades of Shakespeare commentators work on volumes of different interpretations. In poetry, ambiguity can be surprising and delightful. Words work because they have other meanings, or suggest other things. However, in the online world, ambiguity can be very problematic.

If we break communication down into its basic element we find that it consists of three major components: body language, the tone of voice and the content of our words. When all three are used together, there is arguably greater clarity. If the words have a double meaning, the tone of voice can help us figure out if the meaning is ironic, happy or sad. Body language is another way for us to decode meaning. The actual meaning embedded in the words themselves makes up only 7% of the total meaning of anything we say. It’s a shockingly low number.

In the online world, the vast majority of what we say is conveyed in words alone. Even with the addition of static images there is a huge amount of ambiguity. Just think about dating profiles. How easy is it to figure out what someone means or what someone is like from only reading their words and seeing a few heavily photoshopped images? Without tone of voice and body language it becomes so much harder to read people.

Similarly, if you try responding to opinions online or start to have a conversation about anything, things can get messy pretty quickly. Now, obviously, there are a lot of online trolls or people who are angry and just looking to pick a fight. But, a lot of the misunderstandings found on online comments come down to the fact that they simply don’t understand each other’s meaning, because language is fundamentally ambiguous. And now add in the fact that a huge number of people are communicating in a language, which isn’t even their mother tongue.

So, language is ambiguous; it’s a fact. So, what can you do about it? Well, the good news is that while the web has been heavily reliant on text for a long time, other mediums help to reduce ambiguity and increase user engagement. Videos are the obvious way of doing this. In keeping with this, Facebook’s recent algorithm update heavily favors video content. But, if video comments sound a bit overwhelming, there are other things you can try.

A great way to reduce the ambiguity of user comments and reviews is to try a voice-based system. This way comments don’t drown out your original content but allow users to have a voice and express themselves in a way that takes both content and tone of voice into account. If you haven’t already, it’s time to explore voice-based comments and reviews platforms.

Heyoya is a unique comment and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya’s new Receiver plan allows for quick and easy below-the-fold monetization. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content.

Are you a phenomenal writer? Do you have your own blog? Or web page? Or maybe you just write the best imaginable content about your products (whatever they might be). Regardless of how good your writing is, you aren’t writing in a vacuum or for yourself, so your number one key to success is understanding and really getting to know your readers.

Who are you writing for?

If you haven’t yet started your blog or web platform, then great! Now is the perfect time to do a bit of strategic thinking and market research on your target audience. Start by trying to figure out who your ideal reader is. What is it that you are writing about and who are you really writing for? What’s your ideal demographic? And if you are writing for “people like yourself” or “friends and family”, take a few minutes to brainstorm about the characteristics of this audience. Are they teens or Millenials? Do they love cats or dogs? Are they out chasing Pokemon or busy in a high-level corporate job. All of this is important.

What makes you unique?

One of the best ways to hone in on your target market and better understand your readers is to start to understand the blogging or content landscape and figure out what your unique value proposition or niche is. If there are hundreds of people blogging about the Kardashians or the next Miss Teen USA, how will you make your blog standout? How will you connect with your readers – are they your peers? Are you educating them about a lifestyle change or a new diet? All of these questions will affect your tone and content.

Still struggling? Start talking!

It may sound breathtakingly obvious, but, if you already have a readership and are struggling to understand who they are and what they want, it might be worth simply asking them! You can start with an online survey. Google Forms and SurveyMonkey both offer very simple and straightforward tools for building surveys. When you write the survey, try and keep things simple and stick to a few main questions. You don’t want to overwhelm your readers.

Give your users space to talk

A great way to better understand your users is to increase your levels of user-generated content. This can be in the form of social media posts or even just simple comments on your blog or article. Pay close attention to these user interactions; they can give you a lot of great insight about your users. Even negative comments can help you better understand readers and ultimately better market your content.

Make things fun and simple

Providing your users with ways to share content and comment and interact with what you have to say has never been simpler. Most websites and blogs have in-built or add-on comments platforms. However, shopping around for options is worthwhile, as you want to ensure that any method of communication is not just simple, but also fun. One great way to make your user experience more fun and encourage engagement is to start using a voice comments platform like Heyoya.

Heyoya is a unique comment and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya’s new Receiver plan allows for quick and easy below-the-fold monetization. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content.

Website owners and content writers often wonder what the trick is to creating successful viral content. How can you ensure that your creation (be it a product, blog or article) spreads like wildfire and starts to ‘infect’ the Internet. Sometimes the whole concept of viral content is almost like a black box – it isn’t always clear why one article about politics or dogs or food or toys goes viral when so many others do not. However, there are some tips and tricks that can come in useful if you are trying to make your content more viral.

First of all, there are experts out there like Professor Jonah Berger from Wharton who specialize in researching the ways media goes viral and what makes it most likely to do so. The main takeaways from his research are that useful content gets shared more often, and content that is both more positive and more emotional is much more likely to go viral. So making things more likely to go viral can be brought about by tweaking your content to make it more useful and/or more emotional. High-arousal emotions are the key to getting people worked up enough about content to not just read but also actually share. And clearly this makes sense; when we read something that makes us care or cry or fill up with rage; we are more likely to do something about it.

Media hooks are a great way to help content go viral. Just think of all the titles you have seen online lately like “12 ways to…”, “Click here to find out the amazing secret…” and so on. Lists and tips are a great way of getting readers to click and share. Busting common myths or challenging common knowledge is another great way of grabbing your reader’s attention. Trusted articles (ie. ones that tap into known experts or reliable sources) are also a great way to get people interested, and failing that people love visuals so infographics are always a good move.

It’s a good idea to understand the motivations that make people actually share the content that they read. Top reasons included sharing useful content and self-fulfillment, but one of the most important reasons mentioned in a survey of 2500 people carried out by the New York times was to grow and nourish relationships and stay connected with each other. So sharing content is not just about the content itself, but about people’s wider networks and the ways in which they stay connected.

Couple these tips with a great website UX and easy to share comments and your users will have an even greater ability and incentive to share not just your content, but their own comments and conversations too. A great way to improve the viral effect of content is to include different modalities. Most content creators know the importance of visuals and don’t just rely on text, but it can also be useful to incorporate audio or even voice snippets. Today there are platforms available that enable you to share and comment on content not just through text but also through voice.

Heyoya is a unique comment and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya’s new Receiver plan allows for quick and easy below-the-fold monetization. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content.

For more information about Heyoya, or to start using Heyoya’s Receiver plan and start earning money today, click here.

Unfortunately, apart from the bad reviews that are genuine complaints, there are many incidents of fraud, where companies have created bad reviews of their competitors just to make them look bad (there was a famous case where Samsung created bad reviews for HTC for example). And then there are often fake reviews, from annoyed or bored people who might not even be customers. In a climate in which it is so easy to fake an online presence, increasing measures are being taken to ensure the credibility and authenticity of online reviews.

Online reviews (provided they are authentic) provide a guaranteed stream of user generated content. This effectively translates into fresh and unique content for search engines, which dramatically improves search rankings for any business. This is a type of content that can really help differentiate products and services in search rankings. Reviews ultimately help to increase the breadth of language and content on a web page, driving more traffic to sites and especially long-tail traffic (ie. users with less conventional search terms).

While bad reviews might be negative, a few bad reviews have actually been shown to make websites appear more authentic. Just think of it – would you really believe there is a product or service out there with 100% positive reviews? It’s genuinely almost impossible to please all of the people all of the time, and a few bad reviews are nothing to be ashamed of. Having said that, it’s always important to react to reviews, to try and address the issues and to attempt to turn an angry customer into one that has received a high level of customer service.

In many ways, online reviews are a digital form of word of mouth. People trust other people who have first-hand experience much more than brands talking about their own strengths. And a word of mouth is as powerful as ever, accounting for 20-50% of all purchasing decisions. Today there is a wide range of online platforms that aim to facilitate this new form of digital word of mouth, but the majority of platforms are still relatively traditional text-based platforms or widgets.

Very recently there have been a number of new technologies, which use diverse media for reviews, and initial studies have shown that incorporating media other than text (so images, video and audio) can lead to an even greater positive response and higher conversion rates. Most websites remain stuck with traditional text-based reviews so this is actually a great way to differentiate an e-store while continuing to grow a trusted and trusting customer base.

Heyoya is a unique comment and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase the quality of user-generated content while authenticating reviews and preventing spam and fraud.

For more information about Heyoya, or to start using Heyoya’s Receiver plan and start earning money today, click here.

Are you a website or e-store owner? Have you just completed the finishing touches on your incredible e-store, or written the latest brilliant article on current affairs? That’s great, but unfortunately, it doesn’t necessarily translate into higher user engagement. If you are creating content just for the pleasure of writing than who cares, BUT, if you are looking to increase conversion rates, improve user engagement and generally decrease bounces and increase web traffic, you need to do more than provide a great landing page.

There are no easy or miracle solutions to boosting user engagement, however, there are a lot of different strategies, tactics and technologies out there. The trick is to find the one or the mix, that works best for you and your site. But before you do any of that, it’s best to start with some data.

Do your research

In order to effectively engage your users, you should aim to find out as much about them and their habits as possible. You can do this by using your basic website analytics and gleaning as much info as possible. There are also a number of specialized analytics services and platforms that can help you analyze user data in greater depth. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses; for example, some are better with mobile analytics and some desktop, so it is worthwhile taking some time to look at the options and read up on what customers have to say.

Keep your users coming back for more

Many visitors will only ever come to your site once, and this is bad news when you are looking to increase engagement. So what can you do? One thing to keep in mind is the importance of first impressions. To keep users coming back, carefully think through the user experience of your site. Make sure you don’t overwhelm them with product descriptions or content so you can have them gradually engage while you provide more and more value over time.

It’s all well and good providing an excellent first impression and a great website experience, but sadly this won’t necessarily help much once users have logged off and forgotten all about the great article you just wrote. One way to keep them engaged is through retargeting campaigns, and this can be via email, web banners and more. It is vital to tap into your users’ actual interests though, because mindlessly sending website content or reminders to log in will just feel like spam. So once again, the focus should be on the value you can provide to readers or users.

Go beyond text

If you have a content site, you are probably focused primarily on the actual content of your site. Now, the text-based content itself is very important, but it is also important to utilize other mediums to keep audiences engaged and interested. For one thing, compelling or striking videos or images can go a long way. If you have an e-store, maybe you have already aced your product images, but you can still diversify the way you communicate with your customers. And a great way to do this could be to add some voice snippets or audio content to your site.

Heyoya is a unique comment and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya’s new Receiver plan allows for quick and easy below-the-fold monetization. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content.

Since blogging is all so easy, what’s to stop everyone writing about what they care about? The answer is nothing. The truth is, anyone can do it, but the real test comes in growing and monetizing a blog. Anyone can publish a few articles and have their friends and family read them, but growing an actual following and becoming an influential blogger is a completely different story.

So how do you grow a blog? Well, the good news is there is no end to the tips and blogs online recommending ways of doing this. The bottom line is that it takes a big marketing effort to get really grow a blog. There are no miracles when it comes to marketing. However, it is possible to grow your blog extensively without investing any cash.

Collecting emails is one great way to grow a blog. And although it can be very time consuming it is arguably the best way to grow your readership. Once you have those mails though, it is important to follow up with them correctly, and send them emails to let them know whenever you have published a new blog. This is a great way to grow your “fan base”.

It’s also important to generate more traffic through links to other articles and blogs, but even more importantly, writing high quality and detailed blogs helps drive traffic to your blog by improving your search rankings. This is really the backbone of growing any blog – making sure the content itself is as good as it can be. It is, of course, worth taking a look at other blogs in the field and seeing how they do it.

The thing is, many bloggers manage to successfully grow their blog but fail to convert it into a business. This is a really tricky thing to do – how do you convert great content and a wonderful readership into revenue streams that can keep you blogging? There is of course, no one-size-fits-all solution, but there are many options.

Bloggers often decide to create or stock relevant merchandise that relates to their content and can be sold to their readership. Apart from this, the obvious way of creating revenue is advertising, but this is made up of a wide variety of options. You can choose from native ads which mimic the organic content of your blog, affiliate advertising which recommends related products or services (and this is often a great solution because it prevents your users feeling as if they are being spammed). There are also pay-per-click options, widgets and more.

It’s also important to decide on ad sizes and positioning. While you may be tempted to go for obvious above-the-fold banner ads, it might actually be better to consider below-the-fold solutions since users that make it to the bottom of a blog are usually the ones that are more relevant and more engaged with your content. Whatever you choose, remember to evaluate all the options and find the best fit both for you and for your readership.

Heyoya is a unique comment and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya’s new Receiver plan allows for quick and easy below-the-fold monetization. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content.

For more information about Heyoya, or to start using Heyoya’s Receiver plan and start earning money today, click here.

We all know that above the fold content and advertising is what users see first. It hits them when they first reach a site and they see it without even needing to scroll through an article. Although since screen sizes, devices and tablets vary so widely there is no one-size-fits-all that defines above the fold. Nonetheless, for a long time, above the fold has been the coveted spot, the content there has been more central to the sites that feature it and the advertising spots tend to be more expensive.

In 2016, it’s clear that below the fold advertising is also a force to be reckoned with. And while above the fold may still be viewed in many ways as prime real estate that attracts the majority of views, below the fold tends to attract a different, far more engaged audience. Once a reader or user has taken the time to scroll to the bottom of a page it usually means they genuinely care about the content and are interested. They are not just passing viewers, or another statistic in your bounce rate.

So how do you take advantage of the high quality below the fold traffic that is coming through your site? There are actually many different ways to do this successfully. In terms of marketing, affiliate marketing links and variations on the “see also” theme can often be very effective. Often these types of ads are made to look as if they are natural content on the site. This can be a quick win-win for both reader and publisher. Affiliate advertising can take users to additional pages about related products and content that they are genuinely interested in while simultaneously providing a revenue stream (usually per click) for site owners. The best part is that because the topics are related, the users do not feel like they are being overwhelmed by information or unnecessarily spammed.

One thing is certain, the users that make it to the bottom of your page are, on the whole, a group of highly engaged and high-quality readers and it is important to keep them engaged. If you choose to advertise, it is critical to fully leverage below the fold options and not get caught up in above the fold solutions. Both options matter, but below the fold may actually yield better returns.

Heyoya is a unique comment and reviews platform that brings voice to e-publishers and e-stores, improving sales and user engagement by allowing readers to express themselves beyond the medium of text. Heyoya’s new Receiver plan allows for quick and easy below-the-fold monetization. Heyoya is a game changer for websites and is proven to increase brand affinity and the quality of user-generated content.

For more information about Heyoya, or to start using Heyoya’s Receiver plan and start earning money today, click here.